.The original chapter nineteen
This used to be Chapter 19. Sooner or later I'll figure out to tell this story straight.
Warning! Contains mild descriptions of homosexual activity.
The events of the current chapter are those from which my story's original title sprang. I was going to call the book The Three-Legged Story but after the big hubbub surrounding James Frey and his A Million Little Pieces, I changed the title to Lies Lies Lies A True Story, to reflect the new publishing reality: if you can't exhibit perfect recall, why not be honest all the time and admit that you might have some of your facts wrong. People will accuse you of making things up out of whole cloth, anyway, at least if your story seems a bit over the top. Which is not to say that I've made up this stuff – it's just that my memory has a few bridges out.
As I may or may not have already explained, the reason it has been so hard to write Chapter 19, and why it has taken so long to even begin the whole project, is that I wanted to include as many details as possible: the events, people and turns that brought me to the story itself, and to go far beyond the few hours that encapsule Chapter 19; perhaps all the way up to the present. Impossible, that, because now I have certain deadlines to meet, not the least of which is one that I imposed. I promised my sister, Alaine, that I would write something and send it to her as a gift on her 45th birthday. That was 16 years ago.
San Francisco. 1976. A Friday in August. The beginning of a weekend that would mark a turning point in my life, and one which would bear undying approval of the notions the great physicist, Arthur Koestler, set forth so elegantly in his most accessible book, The Roots of Coincidence. San Francisco. I am living on Collingwood street in the heart of Castro District, sharing an apartment with Steven, a hairdresser I’d known for quite some time, and JayGee, his lover, a bookbinder whom I’d only recently met.
On this particular weekend, I was expecting a visit from my dear friend Ronni whom I’d not seen since 1969 when she and her new husband passed through town en route to Oregon. Now divorced, Ronni was traveling by bus from Eugene, and we would have a two-day reunion.
Steven and Jay had already left for a short trip to Arizona, a camp-out amidst the observatories at Kitt Peak, so they would not get to meet Ronni, and I would be staying in their room while Ronni would take mine. This happenstance was a kind of prelude to the The Three-Legged Story. In order to halt the spread of cancer, Jay’s right leg had been amputated above the knee—a condition that, when trying to explain what made him so incredibly intense, lent more weight than was actually due. By sleeping in the bed Steve and he shared, I would in a way be closer to Jay than when he was actually in the house.
Ronnie’s bus was due in at dawn’s early light. I was very excited about seeing her again. My energy level swung between the hyper (anticipation) and the sensible (sleepiness) but I didn’t want to sleep because it would be more fun to stay awake until catching a pre-dawn streetcar down Market Street to the Greyhound Terminal on 9th.
I was not using drugs excessively during this time, but all of us smoked pot, if not daily, then at least once a week. This was a period when the community’s drug-of-choice was toward the depressant and away from psychedelic. I wonder now that if I’d been doing drugs heavily, could The Three-Legged Story have happened. Probably not.
But passion! Now there was a drug I had plenty of, and from which I did not in the least bit feel as though I should abstain. I’d been ruled by passion for most of my life. Driven by it’s potential.
And so, on this night, I would use passion as a stimulant—not so much for the sex but as a means to keep my energies up and avoid lapsing into a slumber that would be hard to perk out of.
With the house to myself (Steve’s room was comfy, cozy, quiet and bright; mine doubled as a music room, insulated on all sides) and with one of San Francisco’s most active cruising spots practically right outside the front door, it was easy to fuel my passion which for now was a passion to keep all my energies at their peak.
Just before midnight I set out on my first excursion. It was only a five-minute walk to that stretch of Collingwood Street that faces a darkened Church-school playground and where, on any given night between 10:00 PM and 4:00 AM, the cruising was relentless—even with the Transformation Church in full view. Guys cruising in cars. Cruising the sidewalks. Having sex behind inner-city backstops.
I’d gotten no more than half a block “into it” when I walked by a pickup truck and then walked back by it again to verify...this was a handsome fellow indeed. He said “hello” and I leaned in to meet him. Introductions. Wonderful, delicious gestures. Invitations.
“I live just a couple-a blocks up the hill.”
“Great! But I can’t stay very long; have to get back to Berkeley.”
”That’s okay. C’m on!”
“Oh, just one thing...I only have one leg.”
“That’s okay. My roommate’s lover lost one of his legs, so I’m kind of familiar with it, by association, anyway.”
I rode in the back of the truck up to Collingwood House with this very good-looking black man from Berkeley who’d lost a leg by enemy fire. In Cambodia, I think, or Laos. Southeast Asia but not Viet Nam.
We had sex. We had fun. Then it was, “see-ya-round-thanks-that-was-great.” I walked him out to his truck and we gave each other a sly little good-bye wave.
Back inside, I reveled in the passion that lingered. In my head. On Steve and Jay’s bed. On my lips and on my finger tips. And in the oddest bit of coincidence: “One-legged strangers have made love on this bed.”
I made coffee and did some busywork. Laid down for a moment and thought about it: “Never had sex with a guy with one leg before this.” And thought about Steve saying how he was sexually intimidated by Jay having one leg. They’d been lovers for just a few weeks and “just friends” not too much longer than that.
I accidentally dozed off, then bolted awake. It was a quarter past two in the morning and I was struggling against the grip of deep sleep! Fixed myself up. Went out walking again, one block over this time, to Castro Street. At first just to let the blood move around, to grab a snack at the 24-hour mom-and-pop or a donut-and-coffee next door. I think by this time I’d given up on my quest for that prolonged passion high.
I never liked walking on the west side of Castro—too many bars—so invariably I’d cross to the opposite side, and amble by a real estate office, a clothing store, dry-cleaner, more real estate, Harvey Milk’s camera shop. But always, no matter what time or in what kind of weather, always I’d be glancing around. The passion. The hunger. The potential. The wanting. (I couldn’t know then that not many years later just seeing the beauty, not having to hold it, would be almost enough to keep the embers a-glow.
Even on this night, my routine was unchanged. Walking. Glancing. Looking around, around. Where is it?
Soon, halfway down the block and across the street, I spot a nice looking blonde surfer-type lad, ambulating, with some difficulty, up-hill. (“I’ve got to get a closer look!”)
With nobody else out but me and him, I crossed the street in mid-block. Completely awake now; not a tiny bit groggy from that unscheduled nap and its close call with Mr. Deepsleep. (Up close I got.)
“Hey, looks like you’re just about gonna fall over! Been drinkin’ tonight?”
“No, it’s just that I’ve got only one leg and I’m not used to walking on this plastic thing yet. Anyplace, man, much less up this hill.” (“Wow!”) “Well, I live just around the corner. Wanna come over and relax for awhile? Maybe mess around a bit?” “Sure, man, let’s go. But I can’t stay long. I’m here with my family and have to get back to the hotel.”
He was 19. Australian. Lost his right leg in a motorcycle crash.
We walked back to Collingwood House and there we enjoyed every minute before it was time to wave the sweet young lad “goodnight” as a taxi-cab carried him back to his family.
It was 3:30 AM. I relaxed on the bed. I felt wonderful. Satisfied. Mystified. “One-legged gay guys. Three one-legged strangers have made love in this house. On this bed. Hmm.”
But the Three-Legged Story would be nowhere in sight until later that morning just before noon.
I rode the streetcar to Ninth and stood right at the door of the emptying bus. There’s Ronni now! And we’re hugging and kissing and laughing and smiling and saying “look at you, look at you! Look at us!” My dear old pal Ronni. We took the trolley back uptown and both of us crashed dead-flat out.
The door bell rang. Eleven o’clock. It was our mutual friend, Mark. “Hey, you guys, let’s have some lunch!” “How ‘bout breakfast, instead?”
Over to Castro, then, laughing and talking and goofing over breakfast—especially Ronni, who’d never had a Castro Street Omelette, cooked by the guy who uses melting strips of cheese to spell out the word “fuck” on each of his creations. Then out for a walk. (I’ll never recall where that walk finally took us.) And, naturally, we were all a-flutter about the three one-legged men who I’d only just now shared intimate moments with (with JayGee, of course, by association alone).
It was a typical day in The Castro, and a beautiful one, too. The streets were jammed with traffic. The sidewalks bristled with Saturday shoppers and people watchers, Saturday cruisers in bunches and solos, and same-sex lovers, hand-in-hand, everywhere.
On the “selected” (by me) side of the street, naturally, walking three-abreast and in full-body animation, we skipped by the up-all-night neighbors—the mom-and-pop grocery and the donut place—and bragged about Cliff’s Hardware Store, 40-year sponsors of a halloween street party that never lost its innocent neighborhood flavor even after most of the area’s traditional families had been supplanted by pre-yuppified gay guys and gals. But those families still came to Cliff’s on halloween night.
This was also a decade before the advent of the yummy—as opposed to yuppie and yippie and hippie—those young urban males one would find lounging around the entrance to Boston’s Berkeley School of Design (where I’d first laid eyes on one and then coined the term) but who now are even likely to be found in small uban settings. Dark and brooding and sexy and wary.
We bought ice-cream cones and stood under the marquee of the newly restored Castro Theatre—Olivia DeHaviland walked the red carpet and cut the ribbon in 1974--and started talking, quite out of the blue about . . . I said . . . “you know how—when they’ve been together for a very long time—how people and their pets begin taking on each others’ characteristics . . .”
No sooner had the worlds left my lips, meeting Ronni and Mark’s head-bobbing agreement, than from around the corner, across the street, came a man with his dog on a leash. The man—and I swear every word past, present and future is true—the man was using a crutch, just one, and his dog seemed to manage quite well, tagging along on three legs. How could this be? Three-legged man with three-legged dog seen by three laughing friends who’d just heard it be told that three one-legged men had although without knowing shared the same bed.
We almost died on the spot, laughing. We were awe-struck, too, and acutely aware, that we were uniquely involved in something Arthur Koestler would call coincidence but one which by any measure was a stupendous one. We had huge fun, knowing it, too. But none of us remember how we spent one other minute of that weekend together.
This tiny part of the Three-Legged Story now ends, with much, it would seem, left remaining to tell.
Epilogue
Koestler warns that if one tried to keep track of all the coincidences in their lives, they would be too numerous to list.
No matter where those few hours ended on that rare August day, one thing alone is for sure. Some part of my life was closed out that day, or should I say spun-off, forever. In the years leading up to that day, especially beginning in 1962, I was guided by so many special experiences that in spirals led me to spiritual enrichment. The lotus, nirvana, mescalito; peace of mind; psychism, clairvoyance. But most of all, there had been the continual pleasure of coincidence. So many coincidental events that it would have been much to demanding for me to accept Arthur Koestler’s advice (which he offered more as a challenge) to his readers to record or make note of each coincidence, no matter how trivial, that cropped up in their lives. If The Three-Legged Story serves no other purpose, the least it will do is allow me the opportunity to describe in detail some of the more amazing coincidences and paranormal situations that my life has had the good fortune of traversing alongside.
But what would Arthur Koestler think of this most amazing coincidence of all—that beyond the events described in Chapter 19, only the most trivial coincidences have found their way to my door, and life’s most exciting moments have been in the realm of the mundane, the earthbound—a circumstance that should not belittle the emotional thrills and spills. But I miss the almost daily visits I’d for so long enjoyed with the world that exists simultaneously within-and-beyond the corporal existence shared by us all. Yes, what would Arthur Koestler think if he knew that The Roots of Coincidence can just as abruptly withdraw nourishment that once had run at full stream? How interesting would be his explanation.
Something fundamental happened that day. But it’s taken until now to realize (feintly) what it was. Those few August hours were a great dividing line that shorn one part of my life from the next.
We all laughed when it happened; we laugh at it still. And I’m always amazed that it happened at all (and I am a seasoned veteran of remarkable things, bizarre goings-on). But it is only now that I’ve seen those few hours for what they truly were, and are: a doorway having no exit, no entrance. Only now do I wonder, having only now just found it, if through that doorway I will pass once again.
The coincidence told in Chapter 19 will probably never be equaled. But, as serendipity has visited me often, I recall a somewhat lesser but still-and-all major coincidence that occurred three years before that August of ‘76. Here it is, put briefly.
In 1971 I lived on a houseboat in Amsterdam, and enjoyed frequent excursions throughout central Holland—all of them aboard a solid one-speed Dutch bike. The city of Utrecht was one of my favorite destinations. My final visit there, I met a breezy Norwegian fellow, Paul Nygaard, who was visiting Utrecht on holiday from Sweden. We’d hardly met when he invited me to return with him to Sweden, saying he was in Utrecht waiting for a traveling companion who, evidently, wasn’t going to show. We took a train to Amsterdam. I packed a few things and let my friends know I’d be in touch with them soon.
And so we set out, hitch-hiking through Germany and Denmark, and to Sweden by jet-boat from Copenhagen. The boat ride was fine, but as for everything else, this was not a fun trip. Paul was not a fun guy, and Malmo, Sweden, was not a fun town. A month went by before I got enough money to make my escape—back to Holland and, eventually, to San Francisco again.
Many of the worth-remembering events that transpired between 1971 and 1973 are covered elsewhere herein, but to finish the story I’m telling you now, we must leap ahead two years, to the spring of 1973.
I had just moved into a cozy little room in the Viking Hotel on San Francisco’s Market Street, and there I met Michael Beliew, who lived across the hall. We hadn’t spoken but three minutes before “it” came out in a flash: it was Mike who was supposed to meet Paul Nygaard in Utrecht that day! Yes, there I was, in the Viking Hotel, talking to the guy who got stood up in Utrecht by that Norwegian I’d gone off with to Sweden with two years before. My most potent remark, upon learning all of this, was to tell Mike how much I wished he’d been on time for that meeting. It would’ve saved me considerable grief!
Does that coincidence compare to the Three-Legged-Story? Hardly. But where does it stop? What about the one from my hitchhiking days in America, when on two successive west-to-east hitches I was picked up by the same driver just outside of Akron, Ohio? No, that was an incredible coincidence, too, but what can approach the Three-Legged-Story for unbridled zaniness.
There’s more, of course, but this’ll be it for now, my friend, and for now, at least, this too is the end of Chapter 19.
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